Saint Faustina & Divine Mercy
God’s Messenger of Divine Mercy
There is a time for Mercy and a time for Justice. Expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden was an act of God’s Justice. But even then, as the Angel was blocking the way to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden,1 and ushering our first parents out into the cold world, God was showing His Mercy to us through His promise of the Messiah, the Redeemer. God has always lived up to His Word. Throughout Salvation history, we have been beneficiaries of God’s Mercy. And very few times has He let loose His Justice. Sodom and Gomorrah was God’s Justice. Noah and the Ark was God’s Justice, but also mingled with God’s Mercy. The miracle of Moses and the Jews crossing the Red Sea was God’s Mercy, coupled with God’s Justice on the Pharaoh’s charioteers. When finally we are in the last days, with possibly the end of the world at hand, and we are about to face the Last Judgment, at that time the God of Mercy will give way to the God of Justice.
God has continued to give us the benefit of His Mercy down through the centuries. A powerful messenger of God’s Mercy, which parallels Saint Sr. Faustina and devotion to Divine Mercy, is St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and the promises of the Sacred Heart Devotion.2 Through her, God manifested and made known His Mercy through His Sacred Heart in the seventeenth century. We come to the Twentieth Century, the Dawn of the last century of the Second Millennium, and we find that God has sent us Prophets and Visionaries once more, to warn His children. There have been many prophecies, including one by St. Don Bosco, that lend credibility to the strong belief that the Second Coming will occur at the end of this last decade of the Twentieth Century. The world is behaving with the same insane euphoria as it did at the time of the fall of Greece and Rome. Decadence, promiscuity, concupiscence, and apostasy are rampant. If we were ever in need of God’s Mercy, it is now. And so, Our Lord answers our prayers, before we even know we need His aid.
Early in the twentieth century, the Lord gave us a simple servant, Helen Kowalska, born in the small village of Glogowiec, Poland, on August 25, 1905, the day before the National Feast of Our Lady of Czestochowa. Poland is much like Mexico, 95% Catholic, but 98% Czestochowan. They have always had a great devotion to Our Lady under that title. She has saved them from utter destruction, many times in the history of this troubled country.
Poland has been dominated throughout the centuries to a great extent by her next door neighbors, Germany and Russia. From time to time, each would take turns invading and pillaging Poland. The period of time when Helen Kowalska grew up in the little village of what is today central Poland, was a turbulent time in the stormy history of the country. Just prior to Helen’s birth, Poland had been chopped up by its neighbors. In 1918, when Helen was only 13, a new Republic was created which gave the country just a fraction of its former land, small enough to guarantee, it would never be a threat to either Russia or Germany. But even that only lasted twenty one years, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and Russia (then part of the Soviet Union) then followed by occupying her until 1989.
We believe this period, this thirty three years in the life of Helen Kowalska, later to be known by the whole world as Sr. Faustina and now Saint Sr. Faustina, was to give us strength, courage and trust in God’s Mercy which we would need desperately in this last century of the Second Millennium. But on an immediate scale, it was to prepare the people of Poland for the hell this dear country would have to endure for the next fifty one years following the death of Sr. Faustina. Our Lord knew what strength the people would need, and He began giving it to them through His apparitions and messages to Sr. Faustina.